1,312-Foot Asteroid Will Pass Close to Earth Next Week With 22 Times Speed of a Bullet, NASA Warns

A huge space rock will fly close to Earth next week. The asteroid is reportedly about the size of the Eiffel Tower.

Massive Asteroid Making a Flyby to Earth

According to close-approach information from NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the asteroid 2006 HV5 will travel through space at a speed of about 38,922 miles per hour or about 22 times the speed of a bullet.

Additionally, the asteroid has a diameter of approximately 1,300 feet, bigger than the Eiffel Tower, about 1,100 feet tall, Newsweek reported.

The asteroid will pass Earth at 6.3 lunar miles, or 6.3 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, is the distance at which 2006 HV5 will pass Earth. This is roughly 1.5 million miles, which may seem like a great distance, but it is a close fly-by in space. At its closest, Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor, is barely 38 million miles away.

More than 31,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) have been discovered so far, including 2006 HV5. NEOs are celestial bodies that travel within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit. Still, they also fall under the category of "potentially hazardous objects," defined as coming within 4.6 million miles of Earth's orbit and having a diameter greater than 460 feet.

The number of potentially dangerous objects that NASA has so far discovered is about 2,300. The label "potentially hazardous" means that, over many centuries and millennia, the asteroid's orbit might change to one that has a possibility of striking the Earth.

According to Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, they do not evaluate these long-term, multi-century chances of impact.

Fortunately, 2006 HV5 is unlikely to collide with the Earth. It will only soar past the planet and fly into the darkness of the rest of the solar system.

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What Are Asteroids?

The Main Asteroid Belt, located between Mars and Jupiter, is home to asteroids, described as "bits of a planet that didn't happen." However, Jay Tate, the director of the Spaceguard Center observatory in the U.K., previously told Newsweek that because asteroids are tiny, they can be disturbed rather quickly and end up with orbits that cross those of planets.

The smallest asteroids are only around 30 feet across, while the largest might be hundreds of miles across. Asteroids come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Ceres have a diameter of 587 miles, and Vesta, which is around 329 miles across, are the two biggest asteroids in our solar system.

For various reasons, asteroids escape their belt and pass by the Earth and other planets. According to Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, they believed those space rocks formed in the asteroid belt and were ejected by impact (in this case, the asteroid is a fragment of the large impacted asteroid) or their orbits were destabilized due to the presence of Jupiter resonances in the belt.

According to Gianluca Masi, an astronomer with the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP), the rise in the number of small asteroids discovered is mostly attributable to advances in our ability to detect small objects. Hopefully, this rate will rise steadily because it shows that we are getting better at watching the sky and protecting our planet.